I’ll be at The Carolina State Theater in Durham, NC this Friday and The Knight Theater in Charlotte, NC on Saturday if you are in the area and want to hang.

I am back from Kauai. It feels good to be home but it’s amazing how just being home a few days and back in the shit of my life and my surroundings consumes me. I didn’t handle the amazing spaces of Hawaii that well. It was almost too isolated somehow. I get that weird detached feeling that is kind of haunting to me. It was beautiful and at times relaxing but I kept fluctuating between ‘I should move here’ and ‘How the fuck do people live here and not lose their minds?’ I guess it requires acclimating to a different groove or just having a brain that interfaces with that lifestyle. I don’t know if I could get there.

Obviously everyday has become like a weeklong dangerous, unpredictable rollercoaster ride that most of us didn’t want to be on. Everyone at the park is scared except for the people that like to see things crash and burn and the guys who just inherited the park and are running it with a bold, combustible combination of amateurism, incompetence and anarchism driven by fury. I’m sorry. We have to keep connected and know that we are not alone. Take care of yourselves. Try to manage your minds and do brave and good things in the world when needed which is daily. We are all humans. I will keep talking to people.

It’s weird that I haven’t had Ryan Adams on the show until today. People love that guy. I always knew him and there were a couple of his records that I loved but I guess I wasn’t all in. His fans are all in. I knew that. I get nervous interviewing people who have very intense and dedicated fan bases because I never feel like I know enough about them. I have common friends with Ryan and I’ve heard he’s an intense complicated guy. I knew we would get along but it just never happened. We would exchange texts occasionally. I knew that the late Marc Spitz had written this great piece on Ryan for SPIN years ago and I was in touch with Marc about Ryan shortly before Marc died.

What really made me believe that I should talk to Ryan was an odd bit of video. It looked like it was from a trade show of some kind and it was just Ryan and a guitar playing the Grateful Dead’s ‘Wharf Rat’ which is by far my favorite Dead song. It hits me deep. The way he was playing it made me think it hit him deep too. It’s a pretty specific tune. Because of that I felt we had to talk. So, we did.

On Thursday, if all goes as planned, I talk to Ice Cube. Hasn’t happened yet. I’m kind of nervous about that one too. Excited though.